Fred Shapiro didn't blink when I asked him if he has an obesessive personality.
It was a fair question. The man had spent six years, often working late at night or early in the morning, putting together a monster volume of the greatest quotations of all time. The result is the newly-released "The Yale Book of Quotations."
"You need to be obsessed to do any very ambitious project," he said. "You have to be driven."
As I noted in one of my recent New Haven Register columns, Shapiro has a day job. He is associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at the Yale Law School. And so he had to work on the book after he got home from work, or before he went in.
He loved it. He told me he "misses" tracking down quotations. But he might get another chance, if Yale University Press decides to do a second edition.
Shapiro likes a quotation with some critical thought to it. One of his favorites is by Anatole France, which Shapiro recited: "The majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
Shapiro has also included many modern quotes from rock stars, movie stars and ever-quotable writers such as Mark Twain.
You'll find plenty of movie lines, including this one from "The Wizard of Oz" often quoted at my house: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
What is your favorite quotation? Send it to me here, and I will relay it to Shapiro. Who knows, you might see it in a second edition.